Pasargadae

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On a wide plain in the highlands of Fars, more than a mile above the sea and open to the wind from every side, a single block of pale limestone stands by itself in the grass. It is not large. A peaked, gabled roof rests on a low chamber of dressed stone, and the chamber rests on six broad steps that diminish as they rise, so that the whole thing reads at a distance as a small house lifted onto a stepped pedestal. Sheep graze around it. For more than two thousand five hundred years it has stood almost exactly where it was set, while the city it was built to crown fell into low mounds and scattered columns and lines in the soil. This is the tomb of Cyrus, and the city is Pasargadae — the first capital of the empire he made.

The plain Cyrus chose

The name reaches back through Greek Pasargadai to an Old Persian form whose meaning is uncertain; one ancient explanation took it for “the camp of the Persians,” and a Persian tribe of that name is known. What is not in doubt is the founder. Cyrus II, the king the Greeks called the Great, reigned from about 559 to 530 BCE and within a single generation welded the Persian and Median lands, Lydia, and Babylon into the largest empire the world had yet seen — the Achaemenid Empire, named for a half-legendary ancestor, Achaemenes. Cyrus chose this plain in his own homeland of Persis for his seat. Tradition, preserved in the later classical writers and repeated ever since, held that he laid out the city on the very ground where he had defeated the Median king Astyages and broken Median rule over the Persians — the battle, by the usual reckoning, fought around 550 BCE, the foundation following in the years after the conquest of Lydia, about 546.

What he built was unlike a city. There was no dense grid of streets behind a wall. Instead a handful of palaces and pavilions stood far apart from one another across a broad, deliberately watered park — a garden measured in hundreds of yards, threaded with cut-stone channels and squared basins, its planting framed by the buildings rather than the other way around. The visitor moved through open ground from a gatehouse to an audience hall to a residence, each a separate jewel in a green setting. It was a statement in stone and water: an empire announcing itself not as a fortress but as a cultivated peace.

Two great buildings anchored the park. One, labeled by the excavators Palace S, was the audience hall — a tall columned room, its black-and-white stone columns once carrying a flat roof high above the heads of the assembled, with porticoes running off on every side; here the king received those who came before him. The other, Palace P, was the residence — lower, more private, its long stone bench-thrones and doorway reliefs of a robed king attended by a servant marking it as the place where Cyrus actually lived. Between and around them lay the garden, and at the threshold of the whole ensemble stood the gatehouse, the formal door of the empire, where the four-winged guardian kept its watch. The plan has no real precedent. Earlier kings, in Assyria and Babylon, had built palaces as solid masses inside the wall of a capital; Cyrus dispersed his into pavilions in a park, and in doing so invented a way of building that the whole later Iranian world would inherit.

The Tomb of Cyrus the Great, Pasargadae. — Diego Delso, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The stonework was carried out by craftsmen drawn from across the new empire, and it shows. Ionian masons from the conquered Greek cities of Anatolia cut the ashlar with techniques learned in the Aegean; Lydian and Mesopotamian hands left their marks; the imagery on the doorways borrows from Assyria, Egypt, and Elam at once and fuses them into something new. At the gatehouse, on a doorjamb, survives a relief that has become the emblem of the site: a standing figure in profile, four great wings rising and falling from his shoulders, wearing an elaborate Egyptian-style crown, his robe Elamite in cut. He is sometimes called a winged genius and was once read, wrongly, as a portrait of Cyrus himself; he is more likely a protective spirit set to guard the gate. Above him, on the same wall, once ran a short trilingual line.

That line is the heart of the matter. Carved in three scripts and three languages — Old Persian cuneiform, Elamite, and Babylonian Akkadian, the imperial chancery’s standard set — it reads: “I am Cyrus the king, an Achaemenid.” Cataloged by scholars as inscription CMa, it is among the very earliest of the great royal inscriptions of Persia, and the model for the trilingual proclamations that would later cover the walls of Persepolis and the cliff at Bisotun. A caution belongs here, kept distinct from the certainty: a number of specialists hold that the Old Persian cuneiform script itself was developed only under Cyrus’s successor Darius, and that these labels at Pasargadae, though they name Cyrus, may have been incised a generation after his death to anchor the new dynasty’s legitimacy in its founder. The buildings are Cyrus’s beyond dispute; the precise moment of the writing on them is not.

The four-winged genius of the gatehouse (Gate R) and the trilingual inscription, engraved by Robert Ker Porter, 1821. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A garden, a tomb, and the holy ground

Two things at Pasargadae outweigh, in significance, even its palaces: the garden and the grave.

The garden is the older of the two ideas, and the more far-reaching. Spread before the residential palace, a formal park was laid out on a fourfold plan — a great rectangle quartered by long, straight watercourses of cut limestone, the channels punctuated at intervals by carved square basins, the water carried in by a system of conduits to keep the plantings green on a plain that bakes in summer. This is the earliest known example of the chahar bagh, the “four gardens” or fourfold garden, and it is the direct ancestor of an entire tradition. The Old Iranian word for a walled pleasure-park, pairi-daeza, “an enclosure,” passed into Greek as paradeisos and from there, through scripture, into every European language as paradise. The garden of Pasargadae is, quite literally, the first paradise — and every later Persian garden, every Mughal garden quartered by water at the Taj Mahal, every cloister and walled court that descends from the idea, traces back to these channels in the grass. To stand in the king’s park was to stand inside a model of an ordered, watered, ruled world.

The grave stands a little apart, in its own quiet. The tomb of Cyrus is built of huge white limestone blocks fitted without mortar, clamped with metal cramps now long looted out. A burial chamber barely three meters long and two wide — low-doored, almost windowless — sits atop a plinth of six receding steps, the whole rising to about eleven meters. The gabled roof and the stepped base have no single ancestor; scholars have traced the stepped plinth to Mesopotamian temple-platforms and the gabled house-form to the wooden architecture of Urartu in the Armenian highlands, so that the monument, like the empire, is a deliberate synthesis. Inside, the classical record reports, lay the king himself.

The Tomb of Cyrus, Pasargadae. — A. Davey, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Around the tomb stretched the rest of the sacred apparatus of the place. In a precinct of its own stand two free-standing fire-altars of plain stone, set a few paces apart — a low platform reached by steps and, facing it, a tall stepped pedestal, the pair generally read as the setting for a royal fire-rite in the open air. The religion of Cyrus is itself a contested thing: whether the founder was already a worshipper of Ahura Mazda in the manner the prophet Zoroaster taught, or held to an older Iranian cult of which the fire-altars are the trace, the sources do not let us decide cleanly, and the open-air altars belong to a practice broader and older than any single creed. Nearby rises the strangest building on the plain: a tall, square, windowless tower of fine masonry, half-ruined, with blind recesses of dark stone set into its faces and a single chamber high up reached by a vanished stair. Its purpose is unknown — a fire-temple, a tomb, a royal treasury, a place to keep the regalia have all been argued. Long after, when the meaning had been forgotten, it was given the name it still carries: the Zendan-e Soleyman, the “Prison of Solomon.” A near-twin to it, the Ka’ba-ye Zartosht, stands at the later royal necropolis of Naqsh-e Rostam, and the two towers pose the same riddle to this day.

Above everything, on a spur at the edge of the plain, ran a vast fortified stone terrace, never finished, its enormous rusticated blocks laid in courses that would not look out of place at a Greek acropolis. The locals would in time call it the Tall-e Takht, the “Throne Hill,” and link it, like the tower, to Solomon. It was the citadel and high platform of the royal city, the watchful counterpart to the garden’s peace.

The robbed tomb and the long afterlife

In the winter of 330 BCE the empire of Cyrus came to its end, and the man who ended it came to Cyrus’s grave. Alexander of Macedon, having burned Persepolis, turned aside to Pasargadae to honor the founder of the house he had destroyed. Our knowledge of the tomb’s interior comes almost entirely from this moment, through the historian Arrian, writing in the second century CE but drawing on the lost eyewitness account of Aristobulus, an engineer who had marched with Alexander and was sent into the chamber by the king himself.

Aristobulus described a golden coffin, a couch with feet of worked gold, a table set with drinking-vessels, and rich coverings and ornaments — and a college of Magi, the priestly guardians, who had kept watch over the tomb for generations, drawing a daily ration of a sheep and a measure of flour and wine, and sacrificing a horse each month to the dead king. When Alexander returned from his Indian campaign he found the tomb broken open and stripped, the body cast from its coffin, the grave-goods gone. The classical writers report that he was angered, had the guardians put to the question, and ordered Aristobulus to restore the chamber to its former state and seal the door. Arrian and Strabo both record what was said to have been written there, in lines that have outlived the gold: in Arrian’s version, “O man, I am Cyrus, who won the empire for the Persians and was king of Asia; do not, therefore, grudge me my monument.” No trace of such an inscription survives on the stone, and the field treats the epitaph as reported tradition rather than read text — but the words have been bound to the tomb so long that they have become part of it.

Then the long silence. The garden dried, the palaces fell, the columns toppled, and the name Pasargadae itself dropped out of local memory. The plain kept its monuments by forgetting what they were. The tomb, no longer the grave of a pagan king, was reimagined as the resting-place of the Madar-e Soleyman, the mother of Solomon — the prophet-king Sulayman of the Quran, around whose figure the whole plain gathered its legends, the citadel his throne and the tower his prison. In the thirteenth century the Atabaks of Fars, the local Muslim dynasty, made the reinterpretation literal: they turned the tomb-chamber into a small mosque, cut a mihrab into the inner wall to mark the direction of prayer, and ringed the monument with columns taken from the ruined palaces nearby. The misattribution was an error, but it was a saving error. Held sacred as a Muslim shrine, the tomb was tended and spared the quarrying and ruin that took the rest of the city.

Reconstruction of the gatehouse winged figure and the Achaemenid royal precinct at Pasargadae. — Falten-Jura, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

When European travelers began to reach Fars from the sixteenth century onward, they came carrying the classical texts and looking for the lost city the Greeks had named. Generations argued over whether the stepped tomb on the plain — the “Mashhad-e Madar-e Soleyman” of the villagers — could be the very monument Aristobulus had entered. By the early nineteenth century antiquarians such as Robert Ker Porter were drawing the four-winged figure and copying the inscriptions; in 1905 the German scholar Ernst Herzfeld first surveyed the site systematically, and in the 1960s the British archaeologist David Stronach excavated it street by buried street, recovering the lines of the garden channels and a cache of Achaemenid goldwork now scattered among museums (the modern archaeological account is summarized in the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Pasargadae). The identification held: the grave of the mother of Solomon was the grave of Cyrus after all.

There is a further reach to the afterlife, one that runs forward rather than back. When Darius, a few years after Cyrus’s death, raised his own ceremonial capital a day’s ride to the south at Persepolis, he did not abandon Pasargadae but built upon its grammar — the columned audience hall, the trilingual inscription, the winged emblem over the door, the king attended in profile on the jamb. The conventions Cyrus’s masons worked out on this plain became the visual language of an empire that would stretch from the Indus to the Aegean, and Pasargadae, though soon eclipsed as a working capital, kept a dynastic dignity: it was here, later sources report, that each new Achaemenid king came to be invested, robed in the plain garment Cyrus had worn before his rise, eating the simple food of a Persian shepherd, as if to be reminded at the moment of his crowning of where the line had begun.

In 2004 Pasargadae was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List — the gatehouse and the two palaces, the garden and the altars, the tower and the unfinished terrace, and at the center of it all the tomb. The plain is quieter now than it was when Magi kept their watch-fires and a horse died each month for a dead king, but the small gabled house on its six steps still keeps its place in the grass, exactly where the founder of the first Persian empire chose to be left, asking of those who pass only that they not grudge him the ground.

→ Related: Cyrus The Great · Persepolis · Achaemenid Empire · Zoroaster · The Magi · Naqsh E Rostam · Takht E Soleyman · Ahura Mazda · The Parsis · Avesta · Babylon · Babylonia · Mesopotamia · Elam · Herodotus · Petra · Harran · Mithra · Anahita · The Amesha Spentas